Review: PRINCESS - THE GOOD GIRLS GONE BAD, LOST Theatre, 16 November 2016

It's a handy rule of thumb when seeing a show - indeed any performance - that if you need to read the programme to understand what's going on, all is not well. There's a fair bit of explanation in the programme for Princess, and, though it certainly helped, I still struggled to follow the plot. Writer, director, choreographer and producer, Stuart Saint, isn't shy of ambition, but perhaps there's just a bit too much going on for the central message to come through.

Over 60 minutes or so, video, dance, music and mime (but no dialogue) is employed to "re-invent" the concept of The Princess in an unconventional way that owes as much to performance art as it does to theatre. Jennie Dickie (looking a little like Sir John Tenniel's Alice if played by Jennifer Lawrence) is guided by a white rabbit, runs into lithe, leggy dancers, male and female, who seek to induce her into a debauched underworld, but ultimately returns to her own life, wiser and with a more nuanced view of exactly what "Happy Ever After" might mean in 2016.

There are allusions not just to Alice in Wonderland, but also to other iconic tales of a young girl's journey to self-discovery: Cinderella and the Wizard of Oz most explicitly, and no doubt snippets of others too. The dance is soundtracked by a thumping score of original electropop songs (sung by Saint, natch) in which one can hear the influence of Soft Cell and Depeche Mode amongst other early 80s bands. Some of the songs are strong ("I Believe In Fairies" especially so) but they pile on top of one another so swiftly that it's tricky to identify one before the next follows, choking off the audience's applause for the dancers, a peril of the pre-recorded soundtrack.

The mushy synths and often indecipherable lyrics point to a more general issue concerning precision. The dancers are energetic and committed, but an awkward mix of Matthew Bourne inspired 21st century ballet and the looser influences of streetdance, ensures that the movement lacks the pin-sharp shapes and transitions that make modern dance such an exhilarating spectacle. Some of the lifts (by the understandably fatigued men) look more like coal sacks being hefted rather than dancers weightlessly elevated. And, though it may be part of some metaphor for how we glimpse different futures, the performers continually crossing backstage (visible through two open doorways) was distracting and did not help dispel an air of make-do-and-mend already evident in some unconvincing masks.

Saint has made plenty of demands on himself - the project has been many years in development - and makes plenty of demands on his dancers too: all that is right and proper. But the demands he makes on his audience to follow all the symbolism and references as Princess matures from dreamy girl to mature woman, proved a little too much for me.

Princess - The Good Girls Gone Bad continues at LOST Theatre until 19 November.

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